Sign up to Safety: Listen, Learn, Act

Listening to patients, carers and staff, learning from what they say when things go wrong and take action to improve patients’ safety.

Sign up to Safety is designed to help realise the ambition of making the NHS the safest healthcare system in the world by creating an environment devoted to continuous learning and improvement. This ambition is bigger than any individual or organisation and achieving it requires us all to unite behind this common purpose. We need to give patients confidence that we are doing all we can to ensure that the care they receive will be safe and effective at all times.

We all recognise that healthcare carries some risk and while everyone working in the NHS works hard every day to reduce this risk, harm still happens. Whenever possible, we must do all we can to deliver harm free care for every patient, every time, everywhere. We must be open with our patients and colleagues about the potential for things to go wrong and for people to get hurt, and most of all, we must continuously learn from what happens in order to improve.

We all accept and embrace the learning that is needed when patients are harmed and we all know it imperative to raise concerns.

That is why Musgrove Park Hospital has joined the Sign up to Safety Campaign. This campaign will support people to feel safe to speak up when things do go wrong. Everyone involved in caring for patients, and those in roles supporting care for patients, needs to know that they can have these conversations and that they will be heard – they can save lives.

Everyone involved in caring for patients can make a difference. By harnessing the talent and enthusiasm across the health and care system, together we can make enduring changes to improve safety, halve avoidable harm and most importantly make a positive difference to the people we care for. Together, as a whole healthcare system, we can save 6,000 lives over the next three years.